December 18, 2012

Please
forgive the cynicism, but here’s a prediction: For all the heartfelt hand-wringing
and passionate calls to action since the Newtown massacre, Americans will not
be made safer from gun violence. After a year or five years (let’s give
Congress plenty of time), the country will still be awash in firearms, they
will still be available to many untreated mentally ill people, and mass
shootings will still occur on occasion, probably even in schools. Guns exist in
a perfect storm of politics, law, and culture not easily revised.

In the most optimistic scenario,
the Second Amendment might serve as an asset to those favoring modest controls,
for under recent Supreme Court rulings, gun ownership is no longer jeopardized.
Recognizing an individual right to bear arms rather than one based only in state
militias, the thin conservative majority has effectively eliminated what the
National Rifle Association and its supporters saw as the dire threat that all
guns would eventually be outlawed and taken from the hands of law-abiding
citizens.

That cannot happen as the Second
Amendment is now interpreted. In both District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and
McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), a 5-4 majority ruled that the right to keep
a loaded gun at home was protected by the Second Amendment. Whether the right
extends to handguns outside the home remains uncertain until the justices
consider cases that have been decided differently in lower courts.

December 13, 2012

No
political movement in America can match the dazzling facility with words
mastered by conservative Republicans. From “death tax” to “pro-life,” they
brand complex issues with simplistic slogans that slide easily into
conversation. So it has been with “right-to-work” laws, just passed in
Michigan, and now on the books in 24 states.

Like the
“right to life,” the “right to work” is not a right but a diminution of a
right, one that has contributed to the lowest labor union membership in decades,
currently just over half the rate of thirty years ago. Only 6.9 percent of
those employed in the private sector belong to unions, which are nearly extinct
in the free enterprise economy. The unions’ last bastion is in government,
where 28.1 percent of federal, 31.5 percent of state, and 43.2 percent of local
government employees (mostly teachers, firefighters, and police officers) are
unionized. This leaves the country’s overall union membership, public and
private, at 11.8 percent, down from 20.1 percent when comparable data
collection began in 1983.

The result
is not a free market in labor but a rigged market, one in which the seller is
relatively powerless next to the buyer. No seller of her labor to Walmart can
bargain alone against the gargantuan buyer, the employer who unilaterally sets
the price. Low-skilled workers, especially, are not in a position to negotiate
individually; with no coin of professional talent to put on the table, they
must bargain collectively or not at all.